No, Boomer@School won’t get an e-mail far, will it? It lacks the prestigious dot edu at the end, and frankly, sounds downright generic. So many Boomers haunt the often virtual halls of academia these days that we’re as common as LOL.
Colleges aren’t laughing, though. Increasingly, they want and market to “non-traditional students.” An October 2007 issue of U.S. News & World Report, for example, notes that, “The number of college students ages 40 to 64 has jumped by almost 20 percent to nearly 2 million in the past decade.” http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/retirement/2007/10/26/heading-back-to-college.html (And if you were a prof, you’d be sending me a terse little note right about now, telling me to “use primary sources.”)
Admittedly, 2 million sounds pretty low, given the 76 million Boomers out there. And frankly, that few over a whole decade indicates more of a trickle than a jump. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomer#Size_and_economic_impact
Still, three points pop up here:
- If you want to return to college, you will find peers of all ages. You won’t be alone.
- Boomer@School intends to lend the support and information we all need to manage and even thrive on our return to college, whether “bricks and mortar” or online.
- Statistics can deceive. To quote the inimitable late humorist, Art Buchwald, “Statistics prove that in the
Best of luck on your own personal journey to and through school.
